Saturday, May 30, 2015

How to develop multilingual SSRS reports (Dynamic)

Multilingual is not a built in feature in SSRS. We have discussed about translation of all static data, such as title, label and notes. However, there are other sets of translation, which is dynamic , based on report nature, such as report generated month, months as x-axis and product names.

Normally, the approach to resolve this problem is to add all language columns to date dimension table, or product table, then use case statement to select language column based on specified parameters. (BTW, Cognos has a built in prompt macro to handle it automatically in Framework manager.) This approach is good when there is massive product list, or report on different granularity in term of date. However, its disadvantage is that table structure needs to be changed when add new language.

This document is intended to offer another concept to handle all these dynamic translation. The idea is turn dynamic translation into static text translation. This approach is easy to maintain and develop.